This dissertation explores British portrait ensembles, collecting practices and framing in the period of 1760-1790. It contains three case study chapters, each of which centers on an individual, their portrait ensemble, and display practices: Lord Chesterfield’s library portraits and their subsequent resurrection (1741), Horace Walpole’s extensive historical, literary, and aesthetic project Strawberry Hill (1760-1776), and finally, Hester Thrale’s short-lived collection of celebrity portraits in her salon. (1772-1781). Together, the chapters illustrate a deeper intersection of atypical portrait collections, collecting practices, literary biography, and criticism. The ways in which these portrait collectors frame their historical views, social contributions, and conversations is a point of contention against the emerging public sphere. Their acts of interiorizing the self as a rejection of increasingly modern life coexists in an uneasy way, as the eighteenth century becomes socially democratized. The Mid Georgian period of 1760-90 shows not just a continuation of the seventeenth-century Augustan cultural practices, but a questioning and reevaluation of those adopted values. The pervasiveness of the painted portrait since the Renaissance continues to this period. Portrait studies within art history often do not attempt to address the collective, nor the inherent signals or messages that the patron espoused in relation to the larger systems and aesthetic histories that preceded them. This departure point acts as an opportunity to reconfigure and redress the connections between art, cultural standing, and commodity in the Mid Georgian period. These factors would eventually go on to influence nineteenth century artistic production. This dissertation aims not only to give a more comprehensive (or individuated) account of portrait collections, their reception, but also their varied functions, ephemerality, and in some cases, their resuscitations as a way to examine paintings’ collection, framing and display in the eighteenth century.

This dissertation is about barricades and image production in the 1830s and `40s. It comprises three chapters, each of which centers on a single work of art: Auguste Préault's Tuerie (1834), Ernest Meissonier's Souvenir de guerre civile (1849-1850), and Honoré Daumier's L'Émeute (c. 1848-1852). Together, the three chapters describe how the barricade oriented the period's multiple, often contradictory conceptions of class, revolution, history, and art. A new grammar of democratic politics took shape in the `30s and `40s, and it was one in which the street figured as both the site and medium of social transformation. Some would say, as I do, that the barricade was the 19th century's most poignant and meaningful "symbolic form." It was also the most enchanting.

Triumph is rare in these pages; tragedy sets their key. They turn on Préault's bas-relief, the political re-entrenchments of 1833-1834, horror, defeat, and disillusion rather than, say, the affirmative image of the barricade Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple is often thought to have engendered; the uncertainties, ambivalences, and violence of artistic production in times of radical disintegration anchor their pivot. Not infrequently, they emphasize paintings, lithographs, and sculptures that evoke the barricade only in its absence. Yet while this dissertation reconfigures the image-map formerly in place, it does so not in pursuit of greater comprehensiveness - with the hope, as it were, of producing a total picture - but to capture something of the dividedness and fragmentariness that the barricade asserts even as it prefigures a world in which reconciliation is possible. Much was at stake in the `30s and `40s, and this dissertation aims to sharpen our sense of the true diversity and depth of the contemporary response, both to the limbo of the July Monarchy and the "dark times" (Brecht's phrase) after June 1848.

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